SharePoint 2013 Workflows with Designer 2013

Having had the opportunity to look further in to SharePoint 2013 I am now looking at the changes with Workflows.  Not the Infrastructure side as this has changed and is something for a different blog. My aim this time is to give an overview of what I have learnt so far with the design interface.

 

So we have three ways for starting Workflow Design which are similar to 2010 and they are SharePoint Design 2013, Visual Studio and Visio 2013.  The Visio aspect I am very keen to explore further and will be doing soon as it looks like the integration is much better in this version.

Concentrating on SharePoint Designer 2013 this works the same for both an on premise or cloud solution and my testing has mainly been against an Office365 site.

For an overview of the changes the first thing I notice is SharePoint Designer 2013 is still very similar to 2010 but with that modern look and feel.  We still open a site in a similar way and view the items in our site but with the added area for Apps.  Workflows again sits near the top and we can create Workflows for Lists and Sites as well as Reusable ones.  The difference though is when we create our Workflow we have a choice of the version and this becomes important depending on functionality.

 

If we want the previous options which includes assigning permissions and calling in built workflows like the Approval then the option to choose is SharePoint 2010.  For newer functionality which I will now cover then SharePoint 2013 is the option.  If you want to use all the functionality then I am looking in to this further but it seems to do this you create multiple workflows and from your 2013 workflow call a custom 2010 compatible workflow to complete those actions.

 

With the new workflows big changes are around the ‘Stages’ which allows us to separate and jump around, something we couldn’t previously do.  By separating functionality to stages we can call other stages based on outputs from steps or stop the workflow.   This is allowed in the Transition option which appears at the end of each Stage. 

 

In a stage we can have either conditions, actions, steps or a loop and yes we can loop now waiting for an action to complete or running a condition set number of times.  How loops works in making workflows easier we will have to wait and see but it certainly helps.

 

Inside our steps and loops we have conditions and actions which work in a similar way but have some different choices.  The amount of actions has grown and we can now have a Dictionary which is stores multiple values from a query rather than a variable being one returned value.   I think the Dictionary could become useful especially if we are retrieving information from an external source. 

But missing from SharePoint 2013 workflows are a number of other actions including permissions.  We can call another workflow so in effect getting around the Permissions but I am hoping in time this will all be integrated.

Overall some useful improvements but Nintex still has a lot more rich functionality like re-usable sections and better integration with other products so I can see the reasons for using third party workflow tools continuing for similar reasons before.